Going the distance in marriage
In a month where many couples will celebrate their love on Valentine’s Day, Philip Jinadu discusses the reality of marriage. He reflects on the importance of being honest about struggles, as well as the need to prioritise time to strengthen the relationship.
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t was a major milestone and it deserved to be celebrated – we’d been married 10 years! So we pulled out all the stops. We arranged a week’s holiday together, just us – our daughters stayed with Grandma and Grandad. I sat across from my wife in our fancy hotel room and beamed at her: “Isn’t it great? 10 wonderful years of marriage!” She paused, then looked up and said, “They haven’t all been that wonderful for me.” I’ll never forget that moment, or the conversation that followed as we talked into the night. In that moment, I couldn’t imagine how our relationship could survive what was being said. I don’t think either of us could. What was supposed to be a celebration of our marriage had turned into a moment of crisis and deep conflict. Conflict is never easy or pleasant – it’s nearly always painful. And yet, over my years as a church minister, speaking to couples and counselling them, I’ve come to discover that conflict is not only natural in marriage, it’s often necessary.
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Herald February 2025
The world-renowned psychologist, John Gottman, spent over 40 years researching marriages and marriage breakdown. With his team of counsellors and therapists, he created a model that could predict whether a couple would stay together with over 90% accuracy. It was Gottman who first popularised the concept of the ‘negativity threshold’. In blunt terms, the negativity threshold is the amount of bad behaviour we will tolerate from a spouse before we react. If you have a high negativity threshold, you can absorb a lot of pain, disappointment and frustration. It takes a lot to get a rise out of you. If, on the other hand, you have a low negativity threshold, then you respond at the slightest provocation. You’re on a hair trigger; you let nothing go.
…we sometimes forget the Bible’s instruction to not let conflict go unresolved.
Generally speaking, high negativity threshold couples tend to keep the peace, while low negativity threshold couples fight like cats and dogs. So here’s the question: which couples are more likely to have long and successful marriages? It seems counterintuitive, but the answer is actually low negativity threshold couples. Those relationships might not always look very harmonious, with all the petty bickering and squabbling, but issues are dealt with as they arise – no matter how small. In high negativity threshold relationships, however, unaired grievances can pile up, like ticking time bombs, and when the threshold is finally breached it’s often catastrophic. That’s what we experienced in our hotel room that night. Our threshold was fairly high, but we’d eventually breached it, and the fallout was almost more than we could handle. Christian marriages are particularly prone to this issue. We know we’re called to be long-suffering and gracious, to keep the peace. We seek
